Directed by Toshitsugu Suzuki. Written by Shozo Uehara. Airdate May 5, 1968.
Ultraseven takes another big swing at exploring new science fiction territory. Drawing inspiration from the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, our hero Ultraseven reverses his usual tactics and shrinks to face a microscopic but deadly enemy within the strange battlefield of the human body.
Fantastic Voyage inspired numerous films and television shows, including one of the Gamera films, Gamera vs. Jiger. It’s the kind of science-fiction concept that would have great appeal for the Ultraseven creative team. We get a different look at the show’s hero: Seven is still fighting a monster with a life on the line, but the scale of the action is the exact opposite of the standard for tokusatsu — micro rather than macro.
The source of the strange illness that will eventually force Seven to go small is extraterrestrial — because this is Ultraseven and aliens are the default, even for small infections. A young woman, Kaori (Keiko Matsuzaka), develops a strange blood disease after smelling a flower in a field. Dan’s alien knowledge immediately picks up on the extraterrestrial nature of Kaori’s affliction. A doctor at the medical center soon confirms it: Kaori has inhaled Dallie, a kind of space bacteria that survives on blood proteins.
Dallie’s infection changes Kaori into a type of vampire. It’s unclear how the bacteria would be able to control her mind to make her walk around in a trance, seeking blood and using a paralyzing breath power. Dan looks at her and thinks, “A beautiful person like her sucking blood is unthinkable.” Well, Dan is an alien. He hasn’t seen enough Earth movies to know that hot vampires are a thing.
The vampire angle takes up the first half of the episode. Because Amagi has Kaori’s rare blood type, he’s selected for a life-saving blood transfusion when her platelets drop. This begins a weak stab at a romance between Amagi and Kaori. Or maybe it’s not supposed to be romance at all. It’s hard to tell because the early part of the episode is a bit murky about what it wants to be, toying around with this half-hearted vampire horror story. As is unfortunately often the case with Amagi, he’s played as too weak to carry a major subplot. The character development promised in “The 700 Kilometer Run” didn’t take, apparently.
In one hallucinogenic scene, Kaori lures a mesmerized Amagi onto a carousel at an amusement park, a scene with striking similarities to the surreal climax of Ultra Q’s “Challenge From the Year 2020.” Amagi and Kaori appear to experience a bonding through the infection. I’m uncertain what the scene is doing here aside from adding style before the major visual effects set piece. Is this a side effect of Dallie feeding on human blood?
We won’t get any answers, because the vampire story fades when it’s time for the big (i.e. little) event. With no way for human medical science to remove the space bacteria, Ultraseven must challenge what he calls “the unknown world.” He shrinks to enter Kaori’s body through her nasal passage and fight the space bacteria in a one-on-one confrontation.
Visualizing a miniaturized battle within the human body is the kind of premise that makes VFX creators salivate. The Tsuburaya Pro team doesn’t let us down. The microscopic world where Seven faces the mini-kaiju Dallie is a great work of trippy ‘60s science-fiction aesthetics. It’s colorful, strange, and might even make you think for a brief time that this is how the interior of a human would appear if we could shrink into it to fight space bacteria. The pocket dimension from “The Suspicious Neighbor” should have had this level of creativity rather than just a white room with a few balloons.
Many of the visual tricks are simple: soap bubbles, nets of flimsy fabric, semi-transparent tubes pumping colored liquids. But the overall effect is appropriately weird. It has a squishy organic sensation that, while it may not reflect true human biology, works as a fun tokusatsu approximation of it.
Space bacteria Dallie’s design is dead-on: a bug-like beast that shuttles about with freaky insectoid movements. It’s much different than the show’s usual wild alien designs. Dallie is a creepy thing, so even if it may not be the most fearsome opponent Seven ever sliced with the Eye-slugger, it does the exact job it needs to for the episode.
Ultraseven doesn’t battle Dallie strictly alone: the medical team is able to provide assistance with their own external intervention. This merges the human and microscopic action in a satisfying way that reminds me of another Fantastic Voyage-influenced movie, Innerspace. The battle with Dallie tops off with a surprisingly cute visual effect that shows how Seven got back to the outside world.
Although Ultra warriors occasionally fight opponents at human scale, I’d like to see more experiments with this size-changing reversal. “Flower Where the Devil Dwells” does a good job at altering the Ultra Series’ style of action, and I wish we saw more experiments like it. The episode is loose and uncertain in its first half, but the Fantastic Voyage climax makes up for it.
Poor Amagi, though. If he thought he had a shot at a romance, the coda tosses it all out. But we showed up to see Ultraseven beat up a space bacteria inside a human lung, and we got that.
Rating: Good
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